The Bubble Wrap Boy

by Phil Earle

  This was excellent news. It meant we had a good hour of peace before she returned to shoo Sinus out the door.

  “Straight to your homework,” she said as she walked away, finger pointing at us both. “No PlayStation!”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “No way,” agreed Sinus.

  She walked out of the door and we turned to each other.

  “PlayStation?” I asked him.

  “It would be rude not to,” he agreed, and followed me up to my room.

  What followed was a very happy but all-too-short fifteen minutes of Call of Duty.

  Mom didn’t know I had that game, of course. There was no way she’d let me have something so violent. She was reluctant to let me play FIFA 2013 for fear of me pulling a muscle. I’d picked up COD secondhand on eBay, then threw the packaging away the second it arrived, hiding the disk inside a case from an old Muppets game. Mom didn’t think Miss Piggy could do me any harm, you see.

  Every time we got stuck into our mission, though, the phone would ring. Not the one in the takeout, weirdly, but our home phone. People never called us on that number. Mom was always on her cell, taking calls about her latest school course, but the home phone? Well, it needed dusting.

  Nobody answered the first time it rang. Dad wouldn’t have heard it above the woks and there was no way I was interrupting my game for someone trying to sell us double-pane windows.

  I ignored it the second time too, but by the third attempt I was starting to feel paranoid.

  “Do you think it’s Mom checking up on us?” I asked Sinus.

  Sinus didn’t take his eyes from the screen, but launched into this full-on impression of her, his voice all shrill and panicky. It sounded nothing like her, but it was funny.

  “Have you finished your homework yet?” he squealed. “Don’t sharpen your pencil too much. Lead poisoning’s a killer!”

  I didn’t mind him making fun of her, unlike the idiots at the ramp. From him it was funny. Plus he’d shut up if I told him to. Eventually. So I joined in (not that it was much of a stretch to pretend I had a high-pitched voice) and we were off, dreaming up ridiculous ways of hurting ourselves. We must have sounded crazy, aping her voice like that, but we didn’t care—it was great to laugh. It’d been a while.

  The phone started ringing a fourth time and rang for ages, then a fifth time. I couldn’t ignore it any longer and, still chuckling, I walked into the hall and picked it up, forgetting to stop talking in Mom’s voice as I spoke.

  “Hello,” I shrilled.

  A voice came back at me immediately, a breathless panicky voice that didn’t belong to Mom but to another woman.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re there, Shelly. I couldn’t get through on your cell. It’s Pauline from Oakview. There’s been a setback with your Dora. I’m afraid she’s had another one. Another seizure.”

  I had no idea who this woman was or what she was talking about. But in the two minutes that followed, everything I thought I knew was turned upside down.

  For the first time in my teenage life, I was pleased my ridiculous squeaky curse of a voice had never broken. After two minutes of impersonating Mom, though, my throat was starting to hurt like I’d swallowed a rosebush with thorns. But there was no way I could give up, there was still stuff I had to learn.

  The conversation so far had gone something like this.

  ME: A seizure? Dora?

  I fought to think who on earth she was talking about.

  PAULINE: (long pause)…Um…yes. She’s been much brighter all day after the episode yesterday, and we’d hoped the new medication might settle her down. But she started convulsing about an hour ago.

  ME: (brain wanting to explode in confusion, voice slipping lower) Convulsing?

  PAULINE: (longer pause)…You know, shaking, having a fit. Like she does whenever she has one of her seizures. (pause)…Shelly, are you okay? You sound…strange. Are you sick?

  ME: (voice higher and shriller than ever) No, no, I’m fine, I was just…having a nap when you called. I must have been sleeping heavily. I feel a bit spacey.

  PAULINE: Oh, I’m sorry. You don’t sound like yourself.

  ME: I’ll be fine in a minute. So is, um…Dora okay now?

  I was on the verge of giving up the pretense and hanging up, but my hand refused to obey my brain. “Can she come to the phone?”

  (Maybe if I heard her voice it might make more sense.)

  PAULINE: (sounding puzzled, like she’s talking to a complete idiot) Not really. But she’s fine now. Honest. She’s sleeping. And besides…well…you know, it’s not like she can tell you about it herself, is it?

  My heart stopped, but my brain whizzed a hundred miles an hour. So whoever Dora was, she couldn’t speak? What was going on? Was it some kind of bad joke from one of the kids at the park? I mean…

  PAULINE: Shelly, are you still there?

  ME: (sounding shell-shocked)…Yes.

  PAULINE: Please don’t worry, dear. I know she’s your sister….

  ME: (HEAD EXPLODES IN DISBELIEF.)

  PAULINE: …but it’s honestly no worse than the one yesterday, and she’s resting now. The doctor’s looked her over, and he’s confident that with the right balance of medication she’ll settle right down again. There’s no need to rush over here. Maybe you should try and sleep too. You still sound…tired.

  ME: I am. It’s just a shock, you know.

  I wasn’t lying either. Though “shock” didn’t quite cover it.

  PAULINE: Of course it is, but there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll see you tomorrow as usual, right?

  ME: Yes. Okay. Bye.

  I put the phone down gently, then staggered, zombie-like, into the bedroom. Where on earth did I start with this one?

  For once Sinus was silent. No sarcasm or put-downs, just the sound of the room filling up with my far-fetched story.

  “Whoa,” he finally said. “That is trippy.”

  “Do you think it’s a joke? Someone from the skate park?”

  “Dude, bubble wrap is one thing, but this is something else. No one could make up stuff like this!”

  He was right, but I couldn’t believe it was true either.

  I mean, Mom having a sister? She was an only child. I thought back as far as I could for the sketchiest of memories of an aunt, someone more laid-back and normal than Mom. Someone who stuck up for me. But there weren’t any. I hadn’t even met my grandparents. They’d died before I was born; there had only ever been Mom.

  “If this is all true, then why wouldn’t she tell me?” I asked Sinus. “Why keep a secret like that?”

  “Beats me.”

  “And what about Dad?” I was starting to get angry now, confusion boiling my blood. “I mean, he must know about it. She can’t have kept it a secret from him too, can she?”

  Sinus shrugged, looking for a second like he wanted to get out of this madhouse.

  “I’m going to ask him!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “Have it out with him.”

  Sinus grabbed me and pulled me back to the carpet.

  “Don’t do that. Not yet. Imagine if he doesn’t know. Imagine if she has kept it from him. He’ll go crazy. No, we need to check this out first. Do some digging around.” He grabbed my laptop and opened it up. “What did you say the name of the place was again?”

  My mind went blank. The name had a tree in it, but I was damned if I could remember which one. I sat there looking like an idiot.

  “Come on!” Sinus looked aghast. “You can’t have forgotten that already.”

  “Some complete stranger has just told me that I’ve got an aunt that I never knew about. Apparently my mom and possibly my dad are the biggest liars walking the planet. And apparently I’m as naive as they are devious. So forgive me if I can’t remember that the name of the hospital was Oakview….It’s Oakview. Oakview.”

  I put my hand to my mouth in relief as Sinus typed the name into Google.

  “Oakview,” he read. “It’s
a nursing home. Long-term patients…blah blah blah…twenty-four-hour care…specializes in head injuries.”

  “Where is it?” I asked, mind racing.

  He scanned the screen. “Near the ocean. By the fishing museum.”

  “Right.” I was back on my feet again. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” he asked dimly.

  “Where do you think, dummy? Oakview.”

  “But your mom’ll be back soon, won’t she?”

  I looked at the time. Mom always filled her shopping cart to the ceiling, so I thought if we moved fast we still might be safe.

  “We’ll have to find transportation,” I thought out loud.

  “It’s two buses to get there.”

  That would never work. We had one option. It wasn’t a good one, and Sinus was going to hate it. But it was all we had.

  I pedaled like the wind. Well, like a gust…or maybe just a gentle breeze.

  Okay, I pedaled as hard as I could without hurting myself.

  Getting the rhino to move was difficult at the best of times, but with Sinus wedged into the basket on the front, it was ridiculous.

  He made an almighty fuss when I showed him the trike, but he was so nosy that the thought of being left behind was worse than the idea of embarrassing himself. With a final grumble, he clambered into the basket, legs dangling over the handlebars. I might have been smaller than him, but there was no way he could get the wheels turning.

  If I hadn’t been so mega-stressed, I would’ve laughed at him. He looked ridiculous. All he needed was a blanket wrapped around him and he would’ve been a dead ringer for E.T.

  We could’ve done with some otherworldly powers: someone to lift the bike into the air and propel us there at jet speed. All I could do was grit my teeth and power us on as best I could.

  We arrived after about twenty-five minutes, both of us ready to collapse: me with exhaustion and Sinus with a cramp. He rolled around on the ground like a hooked fish. I was tempted to kick him while he was down there, but resisted the urge—I’d undoubtedly need his help. Instead, I pulled him to his feet and told him to man up.

  Oakview was a big place, must have been a hundred years old, all pillars and plaques. The building sat in the middle of a huge garden, with ancient trees and stone benches scattered about. Even though the oaks were enormous, they couldn’t block the sight of the ocean about a mile away.

  “Nice place,” said Sinus.

  “Huge,” I added. “Think we’ll find her?”

  He shrugged. “We can try. Reception’s that way.”

  I paced toward the house, suddenly realizing I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. I mean, how do you ask for directions to your long-lost aunt’s room? And what was I going to say to her when I met her? Would she even know who I was? That I even existed?

  Suddenly it all felt like too much. All I wanted to do was climb on the rhino, creak my way home, and climb into bed. But something stopped me.

  The thought of Mom’s face the last four weeks, the creases and emotions scratched deep into it. All the worry that I thought had been about some stupid massage course, when it had actually been about Dora—whoever she was.

  I thought about all the years she’d kept up the act, the courses she’d invented to keep reality from me, all the skills she’d made up just to be here. I couldn’t begin to count the number of journeys she must have made.

  I had a hundred questions burning up in my head and had to believe that the answers lay inside that building. Even though the possibilities running through my mind scared me, I had to listen. There was no alternative.

  So, still without a clue about what to say, we pushed through the double doors and into the reception area.

  It was cavernous, the size of our apartment. More like a stately home than a hospital. The only reminder was the smell—that artificial and antiseptic odor that makes you tense as soon as you step inside.

  It seemed calm, with gentle music piping in through speakers that I couldn’t see. It was like being sung a lullaby.

  The only thing that wasn’t calm was the nurse behind the front desk. She was trying to do three things at once and failing at all of them.

  She was on the phone, the cord wrapped twice around her body as she struggled to feed paper into a printer. She babbled into the receiver in a language neither I nor Sinus understood.

  It was either medical talk or swearwords so sophisticated we hadn’t encountered them yet. After the verbal abuse I’d suffered the past month, I had to believe it was the former.

  Even though she was failing at what she was already attempting, she insisted on trying to drink a cup of juice that sat by the printer. A long curly straw poked from the glass, and each time she dipped her head to it, she managed to poke herself in the eye. Comedy gold, but I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

  She didn’t notice us for a couple of minutes, eyes rolling in frustration when she finally did. The last thing she needed was a couple of kids to deal with. She finished the conversation in her own time, then tried to untangle herself from the phone cord, knocking over her drink in the process.

  More highly medical terms spewed from her pursed lips.

  I pulled a wad of tissues from the box on the desk and dabbed at the spill, mopping the liquid closer to her printer.

  “Yes, yes, thank you,” she snipped, grabbing the tissues from my hand. “I can manage.”

  Sinus shot her a look that said, Are you sure?

  If I really did have an aunt living here, I hoped this wasn’t her nurse.

  She pushed the liquid around the desk for another minute or so, huffing and puffing, until, with a final flourish, she threw the soaked tissues into the garbage, took a deep breath, pasted on a really flimsy smile, and sighed. “Now, boys. What can I do for you?”

  No sooner had the words passed her lips than a siren rang out. The kind you hear in World War Two movies when the Nazis are about to blitz London. She looked so panicky that I thought I should dive under the nearest desk.

  Grabbing a microphone that sat on a small stand, she hollered two words that ripped through both the speakers and our eardrums—“CRASH TEAM!”—before vaulting over the desk and toward a door to the right, knocking her glass over again.

  “I’ll be back, boys. Wait right here!” she hollered over her shoulder.

  At that point I was obediently looking for a chair, but not Sinus. He raced after her, catching the door she’d dashed through, just before it locked behind her.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “We’ve got forty minutes until you have to be home. I’m trying to find this aunt of yours before your mom locks you up for life.”

  He was a genius. A snotty, irritating, big-nosed genius.

  What would I do without him?

  Without a second thought we pushed through the door and ran up the stairs in front of us. Dora was in here somewhere.

  All we had to do was find her. And quick.

  Every corridor looked the same.

  I was beginning to forget which ones we’d already explored, panic rising as my ticking watch echoed louder and louder, bouncing off the high ceilings.

  “Anything?” I stage-whispered to Sinus.

  He shook his head and peered through the next door, banging his nose on the window as he did it. There wasn’t time to laugh.

  It would have helped if I knew what Dora looked like, but I had nothing to go on. Not her age, hair color, anything.

  I didn’t even know if she was older or younger than Mom—she might’ve been adopted, for all I knew. We could be looking all night.

  It felt weird looking in on the patients, like I was planning to rummage through their stuff or something. What made it worse was just how incredibly ill they were: most were in bed; some were sleeping, while some lay staring into space. The more active ones were propped up in chairs, watching the TV in front of them. It didn’t look like they were registering the flashing images, never mind enjoying
them.

  I started to worry about how ill Dora might be. These fits she’d been having: What did they mean? What if seeing me made her have another one? What would I do? I started to freak out, my thumping heart threatening to call the search off, when Sinus yelled way too loudly from the bottom of the corridor.

  “I’ve found her!” he shouted, but he wasn’t smiling. “She’s here.”

  My feet flew down the hall quicker than any board could.

  Sinus stood, face fixed to the window, breath steaming it up.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  I pushed him aside a little too roughly and wiped the window with my sleeve.

  And there she was.

  It had to be her.

  Had to be.

  She looked like a broken-bird version of my mom.

  I don’t know why, but I’d seen her in my head as a big woman, overweight and loud, maybe even wild-looking.

  But Dora was none of those things.

  She was tiny, toothpick thin. Her limbs more bone than flesh, skin stretched so tightly over her joints I was worried it could rip at the slightest movement.

  She was so different from Mom, but I had no doubt they were sisters. One glance at her eyes told me that. They burned with the same fire. It was like seeing Mom in fifty years’ time.

  She was a bit scary to look at, like a puppet on an old TV show, but despite the slight revulsion (and, as a result, guilt), I couldn’t stop myself from pushing through the door and into her room.

  “Keep a lookout,” I whispered to Sinus, who stood, chest out, bodyguard-style, at the door.

  Her room was tidy but full of stuff. She looked like she’d lived there all her life, compounding the enormity of the lie.

  There were shelves in every corner, crammed with pottery figures and animals. Elephants especially, all of them with their trunks facing the window.

  My eyes flicked restlessly over every surface. I wasn’t interested in the bric-a-brac. I was looking for something that reinforced what I already feared, and I found it on the table next to her bed.